Beware, fake news ahead!

The past few days I’ve seen countless articles covering the topic of fake news. Fake news are becoming a major problem these days as many people don’t know if what they read is true or not. The main problem about them is that they can manipulate the people. Many German politicians are getting increasingly nervous about the effect fake news could have on the upcoming federal elections. Therefore, some demand that they are to be censored or even punished by a new law. An article published by Spiegel Online asked exactly this question, namely if fake news should be tackled by politics or not.

Quite surprisingly for me, many people do not really care about fake news. But why is that? I think one of the reasons for that is the normality of fake news. Fake news are everywhere nowadays and we are confronted with them pretty much every day. Many simply got used to them and stopped caring about it.

However, I think we have to be careful when using the term “fake news”. Fake news are not always meant to harm and there are different kinds of them.

First of all, we have the ones that are meant to manipulate their readers. They are by far the most harmful and influencing kind of news that can have a huge effect on elections and various other kind of things. They purposely spread false information to reach their goal.

The next group consists of the fake news with clickbait titles. These are in most cases harmless and only serve one purpose, namely to entertain their readers. Their content is usually meaningless and therefore, they are rather easy to spot.

The last group I want to mention is satire. Satire is not your typical fake news, but at the same time it is, as it often spreads untrue information. These information, however, are not meant to manipulate. Instead they try to draw attention to topical issues and are meant to provoke. Satire wants to give their readers something to think about. And sometimes satire even reports on fake news…